Emoji Gender Mania

The second public beta for iOS 13.2 was recently released, and it’s a terrific update, including clearer privacy permissions for Siri, new Haptic Touch options, and a ton of new emoji.

While some of the new emoji are great, a lot of them are a bit absurd. For every character emoji, Apple has added a third gender option.

While I don’t have a problem with representation — I particularly like the ones that are more representative of folks with various abilities, like the prosthetic limbs, hearing aids, wheelchairs, etc. — I do have a problem with creating specific emojis for a microscopic portion of the population which almost only serve to overcrowd the emoji picker.

If Apple insists on implementing multiple gender options for an emoji, it should work in a similar manner to the skin tone picker, and it should remember your last choice. Overcrowding was already an issue with only two gender options, and now the emoji keyboard is just a mess. As a man, I had roughly two times more emojis than I needed under the ‘people’ category, and having all those extras made it much harder to quickly pick out the ones I was looking for. Now the problem is getting two times worse, because not only do I have to train my eye to overlook all the female emojis, but now I have to ignore all the androgynous ones as well (which usually just have the female face with a weird haircut and neutral colored clothes).

I could go down a rabbit hole here with my thoughts on the whole ‘3+ genders’ thing, but suffice it to say that I think a lot of people need to try a bit harder to overlook gender stereotypes and present themselves how they want without denouncing their genitals. In a lot of cases, I believe the tendency to do this stems from cultural and individual laziness in regards to challenging the established gender stereotypes, and I actually think it’s regressive for one to just adopt a third gender rather than attempting to broaden the parameters for the two genders that exist in direct correlation with biological factors.

Whatever — not my circus, not my monkeys. My goal is in solving the real issue here; the overcrowded emoji picker. I need the people at Apple to realize that adding more emojis every time someone comes up with a new gender (or otherwise marginalized group) is unsustainable. After all, Memoji already does the job.